Ecological Functions and Functionings: Towards a Senian Analysis of Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyse environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services‐based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even for restricting, development outcomes. This article seeks to connect environmental analysis with development outcomes better by applying the capability approach of Amartya Sen and others. It demonstrates how scientific analysis of ecosystem services sometimes conflates pathways of ecosystem management with development outcomes, but that it can be reconfigured to include more diverse values and objectives. The article argues that ecosystem services should be identified more as ‘functionings’ (in the Senian sense of valued development outcomes) rather than ‘functions’ (in the sense of biophysical, apolitical ecosystem properties) in order to indicate that ‘services’ always reflect social values, and that values and scientific explanations of underlying biophysical properties evolve together. Environmental science for socially valued outcomes such as ecosystem services is therefore an important site of political inclusion and exclusion. The article illustrates this analysis with examples of ecosystem‐based adaptation to climate change from the World Bank and government of Bangladesh, and in contrast to differing approaches from the field of sustainability science.     

What the Political Corruption Scandal of 2015 Reveals about Checks and Balances in Vanuatu Governance

A series of dramatic events occurred in Vanuatu in late 2015 involving the conviction of 15 MPs for bribery, purported pardons given by the acting president and a contested dissolution of parliament. This paper analyses the significance of these events from both a political and legal perspective, in particular, considering the extent to which they were unprecedented and exceptional in terms of Vanuatu’s history. Certainly, the trial and conviction of almost 30 per cent of Vanuatu’s parliament sets a new standard not only for Vanuatu and the rest of the Pacific, but quite possibly globally as well. The outcome of the various legal processes resulted in the first ever convictions under Vanuatu’s Leadership Code Act, setting an important precedent for more active use of this legislation in future. Politically, however, these events were by no means the most serious of the numerous dramas that have characterised Vanuatu’s history since independence. Indeed, the events of 2015 underline that constitutional power is distributed and exercised reasonably broadly in Vanuatu with the president, the speaker of parliament and especially the court system all playing key roles, alongside prime ministers and opposition leaders, in the outcomes of political contestation. While we have no wish to downplay the seriousness of such a large number of convictions, the events of 2015 nevertheless suggest a degree of underlying strength and resilience in Vanuatu’s governance framework.     

The Measurement by Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) of Disturbance Within the Nasca World Heritage Site

In this paper we report on our use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) as a means of monitoring the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana World Heritage Site in Peru, where the colossal ground drawings, popularly known as the Nasca Lines, are found. Our research to date indicates that the environment in which the Nasca geoglyphs are found, and the nature of the geoglyphs themselves, are suited perfectly for investigation by SAR. SAR also provides a new and valuable tool for understanding the human activities and natural processes that have damaged the geoglyphs and which, unchecked, will continue to do so in the future. Further, SAR can be used to categorize geoglyphs according to structural differences and similarities in ways that have heretofore not been possible, thereby serving as a basis for a geoglyph catalogue.     

Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History

Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history.     

Petrology and Geochemistry of Late Intermediate Period Ceramics,Southern Peru

Multiple petrological and geochemical analytical techniques revealed significant similarities in element and mineral distribution between the 47 ceramic samples from Chillo (southern coast, Peru), a Late Intermediate Period (ad 1000–1400) archaeological site. The similarity indicates a common raw material source. The analytical results of Holocene fluvial sediment samples, Cretaceous clay layers and fired and non‐fired bricks, only eliminated the Cretaceous clay layers as a potential source material. Applying Raman spectroscopy, the red and violet colour of the slip is due to hematite, the yellow colour to a mixture of hematite, graphite and gypsum, and the black colour is either graphite or jacobsite.